


When You Look At Me

by folkgirlhero



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Fic that turned out much more serious than the fun comic it was based on :/, Ft a phrase stolen from William Golding, M/M, Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, Monsterlover Gerard Keay, Reflective yearning, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:02:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29639925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folkgirlhero/pseuds/folkgirlhero
Summary: A story about trust and ink.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 17
Kudos: 44
Collections: TMA Gerry Week 2021





	When You Look At Me

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by esspurrr’s art on tumblr
> 
> Yes, I did in fact listen to My Bloody Valentine's "When You Sleep" on repeat while I wrote this ~for the vibes~

“Okay, for the last time… are you sure?” Gerry holds a cotton ball with rubbing alcohol in one hand and his stick and poke needle in the other. Michael gazes down at him from the kitchen counter, legs dangling, face inscrutable. 

“What certainty has the wind that it desires to blow?” Its voice is mellifluous and light as meringue.

“The wind can’t give me verbal consent,” Gerry points out reasonably. “And you can, even if it’s hard. Moreover, I’m not sure how I would go about giving _the wind_ a fun, windy, tattoo of itself, while your ankle is right here.” 

He puts down his needle to grasp Michael’s bony ankle. Michael scowls and immediately removes all the bones below its knee and turns the skin prismatic. 

"I am architecture," it insists.

Gerry arches an eyebrow. “That a no?”

Michael squirms and gives a minute shake of its head. 

“Is it a yes?”

Michael grimaces and its face distorts like a cracked mirror under Gerry’s gaze. “Yesssss,” it grinds out, voice like shattered glass. 

Gerry rewards it with a kiss to the ankle, replacing his lips with the cold swipe of the rubbing alcohol. Michael’s bones have returned, and the alcohol leaves a vivid violet streak and the scent of artificial blueberries, like those smelly markers Gerry’d wanted his mum to buy him in primary school.

Michael just shrugs at Gerry’s look. “S’what it feels like,” it says, by way of explanation.

Gerry fills the tray with ink and snaps on his gloves, fussing a bit with his materials to give Michael time to come down after the effort of “being known” as it dramatically refers to giving any sort of straight answer. 

“I’m never sure what is and isn’t perceiving for you,” he comments mildly.

Michael, content now, swings its legs and clacks its long fingers against the kitchen countertop. 

“Intent. Directness. Random variables that are essentially meaningless.” Its mouth creeps outward along its face, a funhouse mirror grin.

Its expression has returned to normal—or at least, normal-around-Gerry. Shades of peaches and cream swirl across its face like someone is in the process of rendering it in watercolor and its eyes and mouth flicker like bad reception on an old television. Gerry could get lost in that mesmerizing face. He does, even, sometimes. 

“Okay,” Gerry warns, picking the needle back up. “Here we go.”

Michael gives a pleased trill in response, mood flitting across the spectrum back to excitement like a hummingbird between flowers.

Gerry fills the needle and starts poking, focus narrowing to the tiny bursts of ink that bloom under Michael’s still-violet skin. The room grows quiet, with only the rustle of Gerry’s shirt as he moves to refill the needle and the soft susurrus of Michael’s ever-moving curls. 

Gerry loses himself in the work, mind sliding back to months ago, before Gertrude, before Mary’s second death. Before Michael. He used to sneak out, 26 and still a teenager, wandering round the city as late as he could, lurking from bars to clubs, eyes red-rimmed and burning from smoke and hours of pushing back sleep. Searching for anything that would distract him from the existential fear that was inexorably wound up in his entire life. It was then that he started seeing the doors. And shortly after the doors, Michael.

It was just slivers of it, at first. A flash of straw blond curls in a crowd, the blurry reflection of a too-wide grin in a train window. The first time he saw Michael in full, in all its glorious contradictions, it was sitting cross-legged on his bed, waiting, like they had a slumber party planned that Gerry had forgotten about.

He had stumbled home at three in the morning, hoping that Mary’s sodding ghost was finally gone. But he was used to disappointment. After an hour of her stalking him through the house as he made himself instant noodles and washed the makeup off his face and tried to drown her out with the stereo, an hour spent pouring her vitriol into his ears, she finally cleared off to god-knows-where, leaving only the echo of her mocking laughter and Gerry could finally sleep.

Only he couldn’t. _One monster gone and another arrives_ , he remembered thinking, when he flung open his bedroom door to Michael’s glinting-sharp fingers and swirling eyes. It gave a jaunty little wave and Gerry had laughed, absurdity of the situation momentarily overriding fear.

“I have the utmost faith in your ability to work in abstract expressionism,” Michael says, apropos of nothing, breaking both the silence and Gerry’s thoughts. 

“Thanks? But also, what?” 

“The wind,” it prompts.

“Oh. It was less about the design and more the placement,” Gerry says. “But I appreciate your confidence in me.”

“You are very artistic,” it hums. “And stubborn. If anyone could do it...”

Gerry laughs. “What are you, my life coach?”

Michael cocks its head at the phrase. “What would that entail?”

“Oh you know,” Gerry teases, smile in his voice. “Helping me plan out my long-term career goals. Curing me of the bad habits inhibiting my success. Reminding me that I am a strong, independent man, capable of achieving my greatest ambitions.”

Michael reaches out a long finger and traces a line from Gerry’s temple to his jaw. Its finger is cool to the touch, and hard, and affectionate somehow, and Gerry’s smile falls and his breath catches in that thrilling mix of dread and desire. 

“I could do that.” Michael’s voice is low. “Would that please you, love?” 

For reasons best known to itself, or perhaps no reason at all, Michael kept showing up after that first night. For reasons that he wasn’t interested in examining too closely, Gerry let it. He liked the way Michael talked him in circles, liked watching Michael’s constant swirling and shifting, liked how Michael didn’t want or expect anything from him. He liked it too much. He resolved to keep it at a distance after he caught himself imagining what it would feel like to tangle his fingers in Michael’s hypnotic straw-blonde curls or to skim his mouth over the long curve of its neck-to-shoulder. 

As it happened, that resolve lasted only right up until the next time Michael showed up, again after an extended session of what Gerry in his gallows humor dubbed Ghost Abuse O’Clock. A creak of the door—which Gerry knew by now was just 'cause Michael liked the spooky atmosphere—and a solid, bony warmth sliding up against him where he’d collapsed in bed and then Michael’s noodly arms were wrapping around him several times over and its voice dripped like honey in his ear whispering that it didn’t find him disappointing in the slightest. 

As Gerry twisted in its embrace to face it, mouth dropped open with no words to fill it, and then broke down sobbing into its chest, the thought crossed his mind that turning to a literal embodiment of insanity and lies to deal with his mother issues was not only depressing and pathetic, but downright dangerous. This was not the first time he had had this thought. This was the first time he didn’t shrug it off, though. Yes, this was foolish. Yes, this might be what finally killed him. And yes, he was going to do it anyway. 

This was _his_ monster, and if he wanted to trust it, he was damn well going to trust it. 

Gerry had his lips pressed against Michael’s soon after that, last remnants of the short-lived resolve crumbling with the jolting electricity of its kiss and its dizzying purr of surprise and delight echoing down Gerry’s own throat. He wound his fingers tight into its clothes, refusing to let it go, and fell asleep wrapped in its impossible arms, listening to the gentle hum that emanated from it like a generator while the tear tracks dried on his cheeks. 

When he woke up, more well-rested and warm and content than he could remember, it was to its glittering eyes and sharp grin, arms loose and gentle and safe around him. He knew he’d been right and he felt a hard sort of triumph in his belly as he pulled it into another kiss, syrupy and slow, sliding his hands along its shark-like skin and dragging its writhing form to cover him completely, a heavy blanket between him and the world. 

Gerry shakes his head, clearing his mind and his throat. “Hey Michael? How are you doing? I’m about halfway done.”

Michael tilts its head curiously.

“I mean with the pain. Are you good?”

Michael laughs, ending with a fond sigh. “Bookburner, my nerves aren’t there anymore.”

“...ah. That’s one strategy.”

“Did yours hurt?” Its heavy fingers trail just above the skin of Gerry’s hands, where the eye tattoos seem to wink back in response to it.

Gerry shrugs. “A bit. But I did these myself, like I’m doing yours now. Three different tattoo artists tried to talk me out of it and I finally got fed up and taught myself from the internet. It’s better this way; they need lots of touching up, on my hands. Worth it, though. Pissed Mary right off.”

Michael always gets very still when Gerry shares something about himself, almost eerily so, with its head cocked to the side and eyes unblinking. Which, to be fair, is not a huge leap from its ordinary state of eeriness. 

But Gerry also tastes faint mothballs at the back of his throat and glances up to see Michael’s face fractaling in shades of vivid maroon, like stained glass. It’s making a soft sound like a gas leak. He puts down the needle and rubs a gentle thumb over its knee, hoping that part of its leg still holds some connected nerves, and waits for it to react.

After a few minutes, some of Michael’s shapes coalesce into eyes, gray and very human. They are soft when it meets Gerry’s gaze.

“Michael Shelley had a tattoo,” it says with some effort, like unoiled gears shifting in its throat. 

“Really?” Gerry asks, keeping his voice nonchalant. “He didn’t really seem the type, from the photos.”

Michael had never spoken about Michael Shelley to Gerry before. When he found the file at the Institute, a couple weeks after meeting Gertrude and taking her up on her offer, Michael refused to hear the name at all, filling the room with the sound of a thousand birds taking flight or the shutters of a million cameras or the color orange every time Gerry said it.

It did grasp both Gerry’s hands in its own, which were uncharacteristically sharp and heavy for touching Gerry, and make him promise, _promise_ , that he wouldn’t trust Gertrude. Its voice was rough and panicked, far from the languorous melody it preferred and its face distorted so violently that Gerry couldn’t make out any of its features.

“I promise,” he agreed quickly. “Sh, it’s okay. I don’t trust her, I won’t.”

Michael’s face flickered, uncertain. Gerry cupped a hand to its cheek.

“I won’t,” Gerry repeated. He felt his jaw tighten. “Too much like my mother.”

Michael’s grip on his hands loosened, fingers growing lighter and dulled. It looked ruefully at the angry red marks it had left in Gerry’s hands and ran its fingers up and down them as if it could rub them away. 

Gerry tilted its chin up, catching its eye. “You’re the only one I trust. Just you.”

Michael stilled, stunned, and then lunged towards Gerry, scooping him up and pressing him against the wall, kissing him breathless, filling his head with the sweet scent of fresh cut grass and campfire and the feeling of sinking into a bath as warm as his blood. 

“He got it for his friend,” Michael continues, in the present. Its gaze is beyond Gerry now. “The one who no longer was. He didn’t want to forget.” 

Michael’s fingers seem to be pulsating, and its mouth is full of teeth, but its warbling voice grows infinitesimally steadier. 

“Ryan.” Gerry’s voice is quiet, with no hint of a question.

“Yes,” Michael says. “It is…” its pause is long, filled with the tense buzz of a vibrating string pulled taut as it tries to be precise. “Strange. Difficult. To be both Taker and Left Behind.”

Its eyes flicker back to Gerry. “And now Taken, as well. There is a poetry there.”

Gerry nods. “Sure. A logic and a contradiction.”

Michael’s smile is long and its voice is fond. “Beholder.”

Gerry stands up to tuck a curl behind its seashell of an ear. “Thank you,” he whispers. “Is it— I mean, I don’t want it to make you hurt.”

Michael presses its angular cheek against Gerry’s so its shapeshifting mouth is up against Gerry’s ear.

“You’re the only one I trust,” it whispers, echoing Gerry’s words from weeks ago in lieu of creating its own. “Just you.” 

Michael shivers when it says it, but not in an uncomfortable way, Gerry thinks. It closes its eyes and so Gerry settles back in to finish.

“Done.” Gerry gives the finished spiral a final gentle wipe with rubbing alcohol looks up at Michael. “Take a look.”

Delighted pink blooms on its cheeks as it bends its knee the direction a knee should never go to bring its ankle to eye level. The movement is accompanied by a crack that sounds like an ancient tree getting struck by lightning. Gerry jumps with a yelp and drops the ink tray.

“Jesus, Michael, do you absolutely _need_ to do that?”

Michael laughs its kaleidoscope laugh and repositions its leg, though not without resisting another completely optional cracking noise. It likes to catch Gerry off-guard, though it took a bit to find the happy medium they’re at now. Gerry’s terrified screams when he came home to Michael’s severed head grinning at him from inside his microwave seemed to be decidedly not what it was going for and it kept its body horror to alarming-but-not-traumatizing levels since then. 

“Absolutely,” it says, more repetition than response. Its eyes flash and its fingers curl possessively around the skin just above and below the tattoo, from its own Gerry, showing itself just as it wishes to be shown.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Comments make my day :)


End file.
